Anyone who fancies himself a thinker, I suppose, should have the experience of mixing his ideas with his labor; particularly is this true in the case of American musical intellectuals, beset as they are by the difficulties of bringing the strengths and weaknesses of the New World to the already existing corpus of European masterpieces. In all the different ways I have worked in music, I have been conscious of the peculiar problems associated with being an American musician. This was true when I was solely a performer. It remained true when, in early middle life, I became a critic. Now, in my fifties, when I am also what is so nicely called an artistic administrator, I find my awareness of this problem taking up a good deal of my thought.
As a musician I have played the piano. As a critic I have judged the compositions and performances of others. As an administrator I have been deciding what music should be played and who should do the playing. My administrative work has come in my role as the Artistic Director of the Waterloo Festival and School of Music in New Jersey. Here, for six weeks of activity each summer, I have chosen artists and repertory for twelve programs, six of them orchestral (in the beautifully restored Waterloo Village) and six featuring chamber music (this past summer at Princeton University). As a general rule, choice of artists is limited by commercial availability and, it goes without saying, by